Hard Light Productions Forums

Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: redsniper on January 12, 2005, 08:17:14 pm

Title: compressing files
Post by: redsniper on January 12, 2005, 08:17:14 pm: I've got several gigabytes of data I want to compress and store. Whats' the best, free file compressor you know of? WinRAR is sissy stuff. UHARC can only handle chunks of <2GB and I got lost in command line hell with PAQAR. So, suggest away :D
Title: compressing files
Post by: BlackDove on January 12, 2005, 08:21:52 pm: WinRAR. (yes I read your post)
Title: compressing files
Post by: FireCrack on January 12, 2005, 08:26:12 pm: WinRAR
Title: compressing files
Post by: redsniper on January 12, 2005, 09:04:50 pm: bah! fine, I'll give your pansy WinRAR another chance. I tried it before and it didn't seem to compress very much but there's a very good chance I had some option set wrong or something.
Title: compressing files
Post by: Scuddie on January 12, 2005, 09:07:46 pm: The odds are WinRAR will not work well, because most files on your disk are already compressed... You cant compress an already compressed file, unless the original method was really inefficient. With that said...

WinRAR
Title: compressing files
Post by: Thorn on January 12, 2005, 09:08:02 pm: You have to set the compression method to "Best"
Title: compressing files
Post by: pyro-manic on January 12, 2005, 10:01:41 pm: My god... what on earth have you got that takes up "several gigs" tat needs compressing that badly? I'm assuming it's DVD images or something. In which case - burn 'em? It'll take you days to compress that lot. Your 'puter will catch fire from the strain... ;)
Title: compressing files
Post by: Taristin on January 12, 2005, 10:09:55 pm: WinRAR is superior. And I recently got Styxx to add rar support for attached files, so all is good. :)
Title: compressing files
Post by: Stealth on January 12, 2005, 11:13:10 pm: i'm assuming the "several gigs" are all porn you want to compress for a later date, right? yeah...

;)

and good luck compressing them... you're looking at many, many hours... probably days
Title: compressing files
Post by: BlackDove on January 13, 2005, 02:09:39 am: Just buy god damn DVD's. I bought twenty recently, and managed to back up all my **** on 16 of them.
Title: compressing files
Post by: Liberator on January 13, 2005, 02:33:02 am: Quote
Originally posted by Stealth
i'm assuming the "several gigs" are all porn you want to compress for a later date, right? yeah...

Or he could be like me and has downloaded 18 episodes of Turn A Gundam and 13 episodes of Gundam SEED Destiny which are 250ish megabytes each. I burned them and used up 10 blank CDs.
Title: compressing files
Post by: Flaser on January 13, 2005, 07:23:58 pm: The problem with winrar + huge archieves is that unless you do a backup browsing in the file will be a lot slower than a zip.
Title: compressing files
Post by: an0n on January 13, 2005, 07:30:59 pm: DVD's are the way to go.
Title: compressing files
Post by: pyro-manic on January 13, 2005, 07:37:06 pm: Quote
Originally posted by Raa
WinRAR is superior. And I recently got Styxx to add rar support for attached files, so all is good. :)

That's all well and good, except only a few people can actually attach files to posts.... :doubt:
Title: compressing files
Post by: Taristin on January 13, 2005, 07:40:19 pm: Not my problem. :p
Title: compressing files
Post by: an0n on January 13, 2005, 07:47:07 pm: Get one of them new-fangled Blu-Ray drives.

50Gb per disc, apparently.
Title: compressing files
Post by: Fractux on January 13, 2005, 07:52:09 pm: 7-zip is a very good compressor as well. I use it all the time. nd, it's totally free :)

http://www.7-zip.org/

Cheers!
Title: compressing files
Post by: redsniper on January 13, 2005, 07:52:57 pm: Quote
Originally posted by Liberator
Or he could be like me and has downloaded 18 episodes of Turn A Gundam and 13 episodes of Gundam SEED Destiny which are 250ish megabytes each. I burned them and used up 10 blank CDs.

Close. X-files episodes actually. WinRAR couldn't compress them very much (3GB to 2.8GB) and I don't have a DVD burner. It's okay though, I'll probably never watch them again, at least not soon. If there's no easy way to super extremely compress them I'll just delete them. No big deal. You can now hijack/derail the thread. :)
Title: compressing files
Post by: Taristin on January 13, 2005, 07:55:15 pm: ...didn't you used to have an SCP badge? :wtf:
Title: compressing files
Post by: redsniper on January 13, 2005, 08:16:15 pm: you surely aren't referring to me? I don't know jack about coding.
Title: compressing files
Post by: Taristin on January 13, 2005, 08:18:45 pm: ...oh, no... I'm mistaking you with redmenace? Perhaps?
Title: compressing files
Post by: redsniper on January 13, 2005, 08:27:31 pm: yes, he has one
Title: compressing files
Post by: Fury on January 13, 2005, 11:19:56 pm: Quote
Originally posted by Fractux
7-zip is a very good compressor as well. I use it all the time. nd, it's totally free :)

http://www.7-zip.org/

Cheers!

7Zip is superior to WinRAR because it can do LZMA compression.
Title: compressing files
Post by: BlackDove on January 14, 2005, 12:32:30 am: Quote
Originally posted by redsniper

Close. X-files episodes actually. WinRAR couldn't compress them very much (3GB to 2.8GB) and I don't have a DVD burner. It's okay though, I'll probably never watch them again, at least not soon. If there's no easy way to super extremely compress them I'll just delete them. No big deal. You can now hijack/derail the thread. :)

See, there's your problem. Everyone knows that video's don't compress well unless you go about them in the huge roundabout way, which just simply isn't worth it.

Get the DVD burner. The **** is cheap today, and it solves SO many issues for us multi-media oriented people (*cough*) in regards to backups.
Title: compressing files
Post by: Scuddie on January 14, 2005, 12:47:59 am: Get a harddrive. Much easier and cost effective than swapping several DVDs to make backups.
Title: compressing files
Post by: BlackDove on January 14, 2005, 01:41:34 am: That.....doesn't sound smart. For so many reasons I'm not even going to list, they should be obvious :wtf:
Title: compressing files
Post by: ZylonBane on January 14, 2005, 02:37:04 pm: Quote
Originally posted by Mr. Fury
7Zip is superior to WinRAR because it can do LZMA compression.

Bah. BrundleZIP is superior to all because it can do quantum entanglement compression.
Title: compressing files
Post by: Clave on January 14, 2005, 06:00:16 pm: Stuffit... http://www.stuffit.com/win/index.html

Win Mac Linux - It's cross-platform and supports 25 formats....
Title: compressing files
Post by: Tiara on January 14, 2005, 06:53:28 pm: .7z archives rule! :D
Title: compressing files
Post by: redsniper on January 14, 2005, 07:42:41 pm: I tried 7zip on one of the episodes. 139MB to 132MB on Ultra LZMA compression. I guess AVIs just don't compress well. Anyway, thanks to everyone who's tried to help so far. The effort is appreciated. :nod:
Title: compressing files
Post by: Tiara on January 14, 2005, 08:02:28 pm: Quote
Originally posted by redsniper
I tried 7zip on one of the episodes. 139MB to 132MB on Ultra LZMA compression. I guess AVIs just don't compress well. Anyway, thanks to everyone who's tried to help so far. The effort is appreciated. :nod:

Compressing movies very much rely on the method used for movie compression when trying to archive them. Some video compression methods are basically the same as rarring/zipping/etc. It would be like rarring a rar. :p
Title: compressing files
Post by: redsniper on January 14, 2005, 08:15:36 pm: so basically... an AVI is already compressed. Am I right?
Title: compressing files
Post by: pyro-manic on January 14, 2005, 10:11:28 pm: :nod: They're sort of like jpegs - already compressed significantly (compared to a bmp for example).
Title: compressing files
Post by: redsniper on January 14, 2005, 10:14:18 pm: then, out of curiosity, what would be the video equivalent of a bitmap? just pure uncompressed video?
Title: compressing files
Post by: an0n on January 14, 2005, 10:35:30 pm: An uncompressed AVI.
Title: compressing files
Post by: Liberator on January 14, 2005, 10:49:49 pm: an mpeg you twit...
Title: compressing files
Post by: an0n on January 14, 2005, 10:53:27 pm: No, you twit, it's an uncompressed AVI.

MPEG's have MPEG2 encoding.
Title: compressing files
Post by: Thorn on January 15, 2005, 12:27:56 am: AVI=raw data. an0n is correct.
Title: compressing files
Post by: Flaser on January 15, 2005, 03:45:55 am: Quote
Originally posted by Thorn
AVI=raw data. an0n is correct.

Wrong.

AVI = Container
1 video + 1 audio stream.

Video can be uncompressed (dunno whatitsname) while the audio will be in some kind of PCM format if no "compression" is used.

WAV is a container just like that, but it can only contain a single audio stream.
Title: compressing files
Post by: an0n on January 15, 2005, 02:36:15 pm: Yes, but if you have an audio and video stream both running uncompressed, you put them in a ****ing AVI file.

Every video-editting program will give you the lowest possible option as 'Uncompressed AVI'.
Title: compressing files
Post by: Clave on January 15, 2005, 03:13:41 pm: There's a whole load of stuff about formats here:

http://www.crutchfieldadvisor.com/ISEO-rgbtcspd/learningcenter/home/fileformats_glossary.html

But it would seem to me that you won't gain much compressing a film clip that already using some compression....